Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87

Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.

Mastodon launches version 4.3

Mastodon has released version 4.3, and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.

There are two updates to the notification system: notifications are now grouped, and the ability to filter notifications. Grouped notifications means that you’ll see a summary of the number of people who liked and boosted your post, instead of getting each notification individually. This is especially helpful for posts that go viral, as your notifications become unusable without grouping. Third party clients also support grouping notifications of new followers, which Mastodon does not do. With notification filters, you can limit specific types of notifications, for example from people who are not following you, from new accounts, or to filter out unsolicited private mentions.

With the new carousel that displays follow suggestions for new accounts, Mastodon leaned on transparency. For each suggestion it is also displayed why an account is suggested. It seems there are four different reasons for an account to be suggested: ‘Popular on your server’, ‘Popular among people you follow’, ‘Similar to profiles you recently followed’ and ‘Handpicked by your server admins’.

For future plans Mastodon mentions three parts: working on adding quote posts, the ability for server admins to subscribe to managed deny-lists and improving how long-form text is displayed in Mastodon. Mastodon also features a request for donations at the end, noting that they are supported by donations and operate on less than 500k per year. It showcases the difficult spot that Mastodon is in: as the post highlights, their competitors have access to significant capital, which allows them to ship features significantly faster. While it is remarkable what Mastodon has accomplished with their budget, the small team also means that it has taken a year to ship this update 4.3, while the competition can move significantly faster. Not taking venture capital, not selling ads, and not selling data are great things to do, but the update cadence of Mastodon versus that of Bluesky or Threads shows that not doing so puts a significant limit on what the organisation can accomplish during this period of protocol wars.

ClubsAll has launched

ClubsAll is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly positions itself as a Reddit alternative. The other focus is on live comments and live chat, where new comments that are made on a post flow in directly visible. The comment section includes both the traditional threaded view as well as a chatbox to invite more chat-like realtime reactions. Other features are easy cross-posting of new posts to up to three communities, and having multiple profiles under a simple login.

With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.

The News

IFTAS has been working on a Content Classification System, and the first classifier is now active. A few select server are working together with IFTAS, where all the media of these servers now get scanned for CSAM. In case of a hit, IFTAS handles the mandatory requirement and record-keeping, and issues a takedown. CSAM moderation is a difficult task for server admins to keep track of, both of the toll it takes on the humans, as well for the complex legal requirements that come with it.

NLnet has been a major sponsor of fediverse projects over the years. They announced the results their latest funding round this week in which they sponsor a large variety of open source project. The fediverse project that got funded is Loops, a TikTok-like short video platform by Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault. Loops was scheduled for a public beta launch on Wednesday the 9th, but this has been delayed for 11 days. Supernault attributes the delay to the rumour that Threads is working on a Communities feature that is also supposedly called Loops, as well as to further polish the app and platform.

The SocialCG, the W3C Community Group for ActivityPub has agreed on starting work to form a charter to transition towards a Working Group. The details require some knowledge of W3C processes (that I don’t fully grok either), but the very short summary is that a Working Group has more impact on making changes to the ActivityPub protocol.

FediMod FIRES is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation. Emelia Smith, who is behind the project, has updated the website with more information as well as a general timeline for when work on the project happens.

ActivityPods is a project that combines the Solid protocol with ActivityPub, and they have released their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods.

The Links

• IFTAS September 2024 Connect Community Round-Up.
• Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native – Bonfire app dev diary.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Lemmy Development Update for the past 2 weeks.
• Minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting.
• Sub.club is teasing premium (for paid subscribers) blogs coming soon
• The two Fediverses – Ben Werdmuller.
• A proposal to enable portability of identity and object storage within ActivityPub through the use of DIDs.
• Event Organizers’ Needs for Publishing to the Fediverse via WordPress.
• The FediJam is a month-long game jam for users of the fediverse, and the results of the September jam our now available.
• Pixelfed has been working on adding push notifications, and other Pixelfed servers can now apply for access as well.
• An interview with Silverpill, who builds fediverse platform Mitra.
• Ghost’s latest update shows some more of their ActivityPub-powered reader.
• Tangerine is a custom UI for Mastodon servers, and v2 is now available for Mastodon servers on 4.3.
• The Author bylines feature is now also available for all Mastodon servers, with an explanation on how to set it up here.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

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DATE: October 09, 2024 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Older adults prefer deepening knowledge while youth explore broadly

URL: psypost.org/older-adults-prefe…

Older adults tend to seek more specific information while younger adults prefer a diversive approach, according to new research in Psychology & Aging.

Noninstrumental information seeking, driven by curiosity, is common across various contexts in daily life. Prior studies suggest that aging may reduce overall information-seeking behavior and curiosity. However, few studies have examined whether the type of information sought changes with age. This is important because curiosity and knowledge acquisition are essential for adaptive aging. Greta M. Fastrich and colleagues investigated whether adults exhibit different information-seeking behaviors—specifically, diversive (exploring new topics) or specific (deepening knowledge on familiar topics)—as they age.

The study involved 498 participants aged 12 to 79 who were recruited from the London Science Museum. Participants selected one of five broad themes: mythical beasts, historical expeditions, prehistoric animals, lesser-known scientists, and lesser-known countries. Once they chose a theme, they rated their prior knowledge on a 7-point Likert scale and then selected a specific topic within that theme (e.g., “Glyptodon” for prehistoric animals).

After selecting a topic, participants were presented with short factual statements, followed by options to either learn more about the same topic (specific information seeking) or switch to a new topic (diversive information seeking). They could read up to 10 facts for each topic and up to 80 facts in total across multiple topics.

The facts were presented in a random order, and the participants could spend as much time as they wished reading each fact and making their choices. Data were collected on how many facts each participant read, whether they chose to continue reading within a topic or switch, and their self-reported curiosity and interest in the material.

The results revealed significant age-related differences in information-seeking strategies. As people aged, they increasingly favored specific information seeking, choosing to stay within a topic and explore more facts about it rather than switching to new topics. Older participants read more facts per topic, showing a clear preference for deepening their knowledge rather than broadening it. In contrast, younger participants exhibited more diversive information seeking, frequently switching between topics to explore a wider range of material. This age-related shift in behavior was subtle but consistent: for each additional year in age, participants were slightly more likely to stay within a topic and less likely to explore a new one.

Additionally, the researchers found that participants’ self-reported curiosity and interest were related to their information-seeking choices. Participants who rated themselves as more interested in a fact were more likely to continue within the same topic, although curiosity ratings before reading the facts were not as strongly linked to whether they would stay or switch.

Interestingly, the older participants also reported higher levels of interest in the topics they chose to explore in depth, suggesting that their choices may have been driven by both curiosity and a desire to build on existing knowledge.

These results suggest that information-seeking strategies evolve with age, with older adults showing a preference for specific information seeking, potentially due to their broader prior knowledge.

One limitation is the lack of representation of older adults in the sample, limiting the ability to capture potential qualitative differences in information-seeking behaviors among the oldest participants.

The study, “Adult Age Differences in Noninstrumental Information-Seeking Strategies”, was authored by Greta M. Fastrich, Lily FitzGibbon, Johnny K. Lau, Sumeyye Aslan, Michiko Sakaki, and Kou Murayama.

URL: psypost.org/older-adults-prefe…

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